


Pity

by WellTemperedClavier



Category: Daria (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 13:36:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17623379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WellTemperedClavier/pseuds/WellTemperedClavier
Summary: Twenty years after graduation, Jane reflects on her friendship with Daria.





	Pity

**Pity**  
  
Jane stood at her window and looked down three stories to where Daria was stepping out onto the wet sidewalk, opening an umbrella as her booted feet set off to the train station.  
  
It was the same scene that happened whenever Daria headed back home. Jane _always_ looked down and Daria _never_ looked up. Instead she trudged forward, the world around her blocked out by the thick frames of her glasses and loose strands of her perpetually tousled brown hair. She'd always had trouble taking a broader perspective.  
  
Daria would return to the padded room where she'd come of age, now her personal office for at-home copywriting jobs where she earned money that was stashed away in a bank account, withdrawn grudgingly in increments of $20 and $40 to satisfy her need for coffee and books and other tools to further block out the rest of the world.  
  
It didn't exactly make Jane happy.  
  
She still remembered the moment, decades ago, when she'd found out about Daria and Tom. The only two good things that had happened to her suddenly yanked out from under her feet and ever after stained with the memory of betrayal. At the time, Jane could've killed them both.  
  
Somehow she put it in the back of her mind as she finished high school and started college. She'd always figured Daria would eventually drift away in higher education, caught up in studies and surrounded by pretentious suitors who were oh-so-excited that a pretty girl understood their references to Beat literature. And from there some upwardly mobile career: maybe in academia, maybe following her mother into law. Morgendorffer money didn't go as far as Sloane money, but it still went far. Farther than Lane money did, at any rate.  
  
None of that happened.  
  
Even now, looked at from a distance, Daria almost passed as a teenager in spite of her thirty-eight years: skinny, stiff, and awkward. Frozen in place, the world went on around her.  
  
And so she never left. While Jane worked herself to the bone to get her paintings shown, Daria stayed at her side. She offered her dry encouragement, which did help, some. Then she'd complain about the idiocy around her. Lawndale High, Raft, grad school at UNC Chapel Hill, various cubicle farms, and two or three mental institutions: all of them populated by morons. Sure she now worked from home, but her managers and supervisors on the other end of the Internet connection still intruded.  
  
Jane listened to the complaints, made jokes about them, and for a while it was like they'd never left high school. Just two girls with time, smarts, and the confidence that came with being sheltered.  
  
But never for very long. Jane had work to do. For her part, Daria understood this. Her visits lasted a few days at most, two or three times a year. Then it was back to work she hated and a sister who outpaced her at every turn. Her parents cared, but they were old and exasperated.  
  
That's why Jane couldn't feel too hurt by the decades-past betrayal. She'd suffered, but she persevered. Life wasn't easy, but it was a life. Jane had a career. She had bills to pay, colleagues to work with or against, and boyfriends to enjoy.  
  
Daria _only_ had Jane. And for Jane, there was a certain sad victory in that fact.


End file.
